Why You Should Use Gamification to Influence Behavior at Work
Workplace morale contributes to a significant portion of your brand’s success. It keeps your workflow smooth, presents a peaceful company image, and allows employees to excel frequently in their career path. However, with the daily pressures in their personal and professional life, workplace morale is often the last thing on everyone’s mind. People just want to get done with their job, get a paycheck, and then spend the weekend daydreaming about a workplace environment that motivates them to put in their effort.
Although this type of work cycle still accomplishes your goals and finishes projects, there’s nothing that makes your workplace genuinely likable. Your employees won’t bother to go the extra mile to prove their potential or contribute any positivity to the company’s environment because they see no reciprocation of their efforts!
Why You Should Use Gamification to Influence Behavior at Work
When you see someone lacking luster in their work quality or professional interactions, it’s most probably due to the absence of a creative space where they feel like they’ll be heard, understood, recognized, and appreciated for their struggles, achievements, successes, and failures.
Instead of feeling humane and experiencing liberation while earning their livelihood, they feel like their workplace imprisons their identity and hinders their professional growth. What goes wrong in a non-gamified environment is basically about meeting a dead-end instead of venues where employees can have their psychosocial, cultural, ethical, or professional releases.
This doesn’t mean they need to ditch work, though. While altering crucial workplace dynamics doesn’t offer a practical solution, workplaces can still adopt changes in their environment to make it more fun, employee-centric, cathartic, and productive. For this purpose, gamification provides a one-stop solution to all your workplace problems, no matter how critical or trivial.
Gamification at workplaces focuses on the behavior of employees and other workplace stakeholders instead of issuing vague commands in the form of deadlines or project targets. Working in a gamified augmentation offers a vivid experience where employees can explore themselves and indirectly benefit their company, too.
If you’re wondering why and how gamification may work for your workplace model, here’s what you need to know!
1. Gamification Rewards Everyone
When you put up a leaderboard ranking at your workplace, it may initially seem like you’re pitching your employees and execs against one another. After all, it can lead up to unhealthy competition and ulterior motives, right? Well, that’s certainly a possibility, but the benefits of gamification far outweigh the possible risks of competitiveness. True, there is an edge of competitive spirit in this concept, but gamifying your strategies serves a larger purpose, too. Even when a specific group of employees adds an extra bag of effort to the work they deliver, this inadvertently benefits your whole company because everyone shares a similar purpose!
2. You Can Construct Models that are Unique to Your Company
When you form the peripheral structure of your workplace, there are some baselines that you follow out of habit. This may include sick leaves, vacations, business trips, health, education, security, mentoring, and so on. Although these elements complete your company’s profile, you need some more add-ons to make your company truly unique, and a place more and more people approach to work for. You can use various gamification elements, such as analytical progress, bonuses, and others, to create an employee reward program that centers around your employee and company profiles.
3. Helps Eliminate Workplace Toxicity
This may sound exaggerated, but a tedious workspace environment often contributes to toxicity and frustration in the personal and professional lives in general. You may have heard the phrase, “all games and no fun makes for a dull person.” In a workplace that only emphasizes meeting deadlines, listening to superiors, filing for loans, and other routine chores, the environment can get steadily burdensome.
But when you add gamification to the equation, it helps expose behavioral traits that lead to this arduous environment. Your gamification can reveal unhealthy partnership traits, harmful employee characteristics, hidden hierarchies, late submissions, and a variety of other toxic elements that disrupt the overall workflow and quality of your workplace.
4. Allows Career Counselling Insights
When you gamify your workplace experiences, the insights you gather do not stay confined to paper or digital databases. Instead, the information you compile comes from observed behaviors, aspirational differences, real-time SWOT analyses, and a host of other real-time data sets.
Although it doesn’t negate the usefulness of professional career counseling practices, gamification of workplaces environment opens up new avenues for career counselors and HR professionals for gauging and predicting the professional trajectories of individual employees, departments, batches, seniority levels, and the company as a whole. Besides this, gamification of professional spaces also helps implement career counseling strategies, such as savings, promotions, intellectual grooming, etc.
5. Your Employees Can Monitor Personal Growth
Everyday workplace practices often undermine employee privacy and sanctity. Though it’s essential to call out employees on their substandard work quality, the traditional methods of probation and other techniques often turn out to have derogatory effects on the minds and experiences of tour employees.
True, they need to be thick-skinned when working in a professional capacity, but by employing gamified rectification, you can get better quality of work from your employees. This is because gamification subtly and indirectly adopts techniques for individuals to monitor their developments instead of keeping it a bland competition for everyone.
6. You Can Achieve Secondary Targets
Another reason why you need to use gamification to influence workplace behavior is that it has the power to influence employees to accommodate secondary goals into their professional objectives. It’s like those secret levels in video games that give extra credit for your gameplay.
You can continue your regular work per usual, but you can also design gamification concepts that combine a range of long-term and short-term goals within the normal workstream. This can help the company to connect several projects and achieve new milestones faster and without adding unnecessary strain on its employees.
7. Compensates for the Bonus You’re Offering
Okay, there’s no denying that bonuses and incentives are an employee’s right. However, they’re hefty expenses on behalf of both large MNCs and SMEs, and especially in times like inflation or shutdowns, or cybersecurity problems, the bonus part of an employee’s salary can add quite a lot of strain to the company’s funds and space for growth.
Fortunately, gamifying these traditional practices keeps your employee’s integrity and rights intact while also recusing the strain on your company’s resources. You can do this in several ways. One is to make bonus achievement possible through gamifying goal achievement. Another way is to exchange gamification credits for extra bonuses. A third way could be through using gamification to choose one’s bonus types.
8. Compliments Sales Gamification
Gamification within an organization occurs at multiple levels, with sales gamification being one of the most prominent methods. Whoever your external publics are, you may be pitching to them using sales gamification to attract better fish from the sea. Well, gamification within your internal public affairs compliments that external gamification. You can connect workplace gamification concepts such as discounts and beta versions to sales gamification with your external public, and so on. This way, gamification will provide you with an all-rounded control over your internal and external gamification, allowing you to multiplicate the effects, too.
Conclusion
Are you worried about the deteriorating workplace practices in your company? That’s a natural occurrence in every brand’s life today, unfortunately. No matter how much you provide your employees with, they will need a little fun to make their work mean something more than just financial security for them. With that said, gamification offers a safe and reliable way to introduce subtle yet meaningful behavioral changes in your workplace!
References
Put those insights into practice.
Set your team up for success by improving their performance through gamification.
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